Licences: Why so confusing?

I’ve never understood why Envato has to make the licenses so confusing. Why all the legal jargon?

To be honest, I’d prefer the licenses to be written in plan English.

Regular:
Can be used in one application – an application is defined as [bla]
You are not allowed to offer this for resale or as part of a client’s work.
You can include the product in an application that can be distributed an unlimited number of times but you may not include it in any more applications without another regular license.

I’ve received quite a few questions concerning licenses, I’m almost never able to give an answer because of that, especially when it comes to the extended one. It’s also confusing to have to same rules for all marketplaces, selling videos or soundtracks is not the same thing as selling code snippets or templates. Anyway, some clarification would be welcome.

some licence questions I’ve received for php scripts and plugins that I’m uncertain what licence (if any) would be suitable. I just tell them buy 1+ extended licences and grant them xyz permissions.

can I install this once, but activate it on my 30 WPMU installs? what licence do I buy?

can I buy this item once and then use it in all my customers websites (10 existing websites and as many new websites as I get in the future from now on, without having to come back here and buy a licence each time I build a new website)

can I buy this and resell it under a different name as-is to my own customers / private distribution channel? what licence do I buy?

can I use this in a template I’m selling on themeforest?

can pull some code/features out of this script and implement it in my script? can I sell that script to my clients? can I sell that modified script on codecanyon?

can I use your script in my free web service? I’m not re-selling it or making any money from it. Multiple users can sign up to my service and can use your script?

can I buy a regular licence, include your script in my application, and then sell it / distribute it as many times as I like?

because I’m not allowed to resell your script as-is, how many modifications do I need to make to your script to class it as an addition to my own application so that I can resell it?

put down the pizza and work on your broken script for a while and get the BUGS fixed (not a licencing comment, but had to include it as it’s the best comment I’ve ever received)

I’m sure other authors can drum up some possible use-cases that are not covered under a licence, or would be confusing when applied to a different item type on the same marketplace (eg: a codecanyon iphone app vs. a codecanyon wordpress plugin).

We’re definitely in agreement with you that licensing can be improved. Envato hired a legal expert last year and she is already working on improving our licenses. It takes time to complete such a project because of how different each of the marketplaces are, but suffice to say, this is obviously a very important project and one that is already being worked on as we speak.

I had bought a theme that came in 2 versions, “light” “dark” but even the layouts were different and added options..
The way the Lic reads..almost sounded like I could install 1 of each template, since they do not match at all.
I contacted the author to ask…. guess what he said, “I’m not sure, you need to contact envato”

scottwills said
We’re definitely in agreement with you that licensing can be improved. Envato hired a legal expert last year and she is already working on improving our licenses. It takes time to complete such a project because of how different each of the marketplaces are, but suffice to say, this is obviously a very important project and one that is already being worked on as we speak.

It is great that something is happening. And I understand that there are other things more important.

We’ve given up on this as we almost weekly get questions about developer license…. “can I install this on all my clients websites”.
I know this is night right, but we simply tell them to buy an Extended License. Saying its not possible will most likely result in no sale and the customer will go somewhere else.